The Blog

January 23, 2008

Living on the asymptote

I was speaking with a CRM vendor the other day about positioning and messaging for sales force automation.The vendor was telling me that the company wanted a back to basics message that would focus on the importance of SFA in helping sales people recover some of the time they invest in unproductive activities.

On the face of it, this sounds like a reasonable approach and in fact it is one of the staples of the SFA world.Sales force automation got going when companies like Siebel began telling their customers that sales force productivity could improve if sales people could spend more time in front of customers and less in dealing with administrivia.It’s been a grail quest ever since.

I gently tried to point out to the vendor that since this message has been a staple of SFA messaging for over ten years that it might be time to look elsewhere for a way to improve selling.After all, the need for new messaging is all around us.All you need to do is look at the inroads made by Sales 2.0 ideas and Web 2.0 technologies to see.

We ended the conversation without any minds being changed.I continue to believe in the changing nature of selling, the need for new positioning and the messaging it entails.The vendor is committed to a back to basics approach.Perhaps I was not making good arguments or maybe I was just speaking with a person who is not able to decide on change and further internal discussions will result in a different tact.We shall see.

It all got me thinking about the limit or, graphically, the asymptote, of the sales productivity improvement curve.If ‘asymptote’ is an unfamiliar term, imagine a curve that rises from left to right and gently falls over like a blade of grass in a breeze.The asymptote would be an imaginary flat line above the curve that the curve never actually reaches.In mathematics, the curve reaches the asymptote at infinity but, as a practical matter, in real life it takes progressively more effort and energy to close the gap.

In business when confronted with an asymptotic boundary condition savvy managers look for ways to change the game and, in effect, jump the boundary so that the ceiling becomes the floor and a new curve, or blade of grass, is established.That’s what is so intriguing about the Sales 2.0 movement that incorporates Web 2.0 technologies and social networking ideas.

As I have said before, we have spent a lot of time and effort trying to improve the sales process with products like SFA and sales methodologies.Those tools have been great at making big gains in productivity and face time, but there is only so much time in a sales person’s day to optimize and at this point pushing further will come at great cost.For a company or a sales person who does not currently use automation, the opportunities for improvement are still vast but that population is dwindling.For example, the other day at the Force.com event in San Francisco, a CEO told me that these days his company rarely has to hire a sales person who does not have experience using some form of SFA.It has become ubiquitous.

The move now, in my opinion, is not to proceed further in trying to wring out more face time, though some improvements can still happen.For me, the biggest opportunity is not in improving the sales process but in improving the inputs to the process which include the lead itself and the information flow to the customer.

If you look at Sales 2.0 that’s exactly what is happening.Companies are using advanced marketing technologies to better segment and mature prospective customers so that when a sales person gets a lead, it is far more actionable than the leads that were handed out just a few years ago.In taking this approach the ceiling has become the floor from which a new productivity curve is rising.

A whole industry segment which was once called sales effectiveness is growing up around this idea.What was once considered a hodgepodge of disparate point solutions is organizing itself into solutions for the pre- and post-sales processes.

So that’s why I am not a great fan of the improved productivity message.Productivity is still important but truth be told it has had its day.Productivity improvement is now taken for granted, table stakes in the larger conversation about how to sell today.

Share this:

Discussion

What a super clear post. The whole “database of intentions”, “customer context”, “crowd-sourcing”, “collaboration” thing is truly very powerful. One way of looking at this (might be) to map and re-invent the interaction cycles. A lot of work is / has gone into thinking about how internet based activities can help drive lead generation, and even customer support, but not that much has happened “within the company itself” to bring this kind of data to the centre of the actual product or service design cycle itself” (IMHO).

I guess that if salespeople think using an SFA solution and taking the time to enter the required data is a drain on productivity, a solution that lessens that burden could bring a perceived productivity increase. In that situation, however, the real problem is a lack of buy-in from the sales force, and no new solution is likely to fix that on its own.